Watchdog: Congress must probe Murdoch media

The U.S. Congress should probe whether journalists working for Rupert Murdoch’s News International have crossed the Atlantic with illegal, unethical news gathering practices, a watchdog group said Monday.

The investigation call by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) came as the hacking scandal in Britain grew beyond now-closed News of the World and possibly extended to New York.

The Daily Mirror, in London, reported claims by a former New York city police officer that the News of the World offered him money to retrieve phone records of 9/11 victims and their families.

BBC and The Guardian reported that two other outlets in the Murdoch media empire — the Sun and the Sunday Times — targeted former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, at one point seeking his bank records. The Sun scored a “scoop” in reporting that the Browns’ newborn baby suffered from cystic fibrosis.

“Given the ever-increasing number of Murdoch publications involved, combined with the allegations that News Corps. journalists sought access to the voice mails of 9/11 victims and their families, Americans cannot leave this investigation entirely to the British,” said CREW executive director Melanie Sloan.

“Politicians in Washington may not be able to agree on much these days, but at the very least they should be able to agree that efforts to hack the phones of those killed in the worst terrorist attack in American history merits thorough public hearings.”

News Corp., which owns News International, owns three major U.S. news outlets — Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post.

Les Hinton, former head of News International, is now the chief executive officer at the Dow Jones Co., which publishes the Wall Street Journal. In 2007, he told a British parliamentary committee that hacking was limited to a single reporter who had served a short jail sentence.

In its regular weekend media panel, Fox News discussed such topics as the Casey Anthony trial, cancellation of ex-Gov. Ellit Spitzer’s CNN talk show, and MSNBC’s suspension of pundit Mark Halperin after he used a vulgarism to characterize President Obama.

But Fox News Watch did not discuss the British scandal making headlines in The New York Times and Washington Post, and extensively discussed on ABC’s “This Week.”

CREW is a non-profit legal watchdog group dedicated to holding public officials’ feet to the fire.